Blood on the wall

Evidence. There are a fair number of people who need more than the usual media reporting before they’ll believe about themselves and their “side” what they’ll believe—with little or no prompting—about the other. They say they need “evidence.” They say they need something red handed. Anything else is hearsay. They need to see some blood on the wall. Here’s a running list.

• Investment fund manager Jeremy Grantham of GMO LLC makes the case for the end of growth. Rising resource costs, coupled with the damaging effects of climate change, will reduce U.S. GDP growth to 1.9% in the near term and 0.4% in the long term. Entrenched capitalist interests will resist all change, dooming all of us to “lose this game.”

• Bruce Bartlett, a former fellow at the right-wing think tank National Center for Policy Analysis, was fired in 2005 for writing a book critical of George Bush. On March 25, 2010, David Frum is fired from his position with the American Enterprise Institute for being critical of Republican opposition to President Obama’s health care bill. Bartlett reveals that in a private conversation he had with Frum several months earlier, Frum told him the AEI had ordered its “scholars” not to talk to the media because they all agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

• Retired chairman of Citigroup John S. Reed, who in 1999 championed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, now admits it was a bad idea and says it or something like it should be reinstated along with stiffer regulatory requirements for banks and investment houses. This he wrote in a letter to the editor in the New York Times, Oct. 22, 2009.

• Former Cigna executive Wendell Potter reveals how health care companies in the U.S. are consciously acting against the interests of Americans in the pursuit of profits. From a two-part Bill Moyers interview.

• Former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge admits in a new book that the system of color-coded terror alerts was in fact used politically, with threat levels raised in order to help Bush win re-election in 2004.